Content marketing - what not to do

There always seem to be lists of 'don'ts' with content marketing but not great depth as to why, says Studio44’s Doug Rubashow. This article will give a bit more detail on what not to do with your content marketing - and more importantly why!

RUN HEAD

Content marketing is mostly about building credibility and offering up as much information as you can about the club. Most of the time if a visitor has found their way to your content, they’re already interested. If you then impress them with the quality of your content and your website, there’s a good chance they will make an enquiry.

Don’t plagiarise content
All content should ideally be unique. It’s a little bit of an SEO myth that any duplicate content from another site that you post on yours will get your website penalised and harm your ranking, but if you’re copying content from another site firstly you risk lawyers getting involved if you don’t reference properly and secondly you’re unlikely to see your content gain more search engine traction than the original content.

Aside from the technical faux pas of plagiarising content word for word, any content you publish should be using a cohesive voice to add value to your club and if your website is publishing content that isn’t yours from multiple sources it’s going to read like a jumbled mess – not great for user experience.

In addition to the above, who knows more about your club and club business than you? So why would you want to copy content from someone else when you’re best placed to be creating the content yourself?

Don’t write content for the sake of it
We have seen it all before on business blogs where you can tell that there has been a necessary quota of words or posts that need to go up, and consequently posts with very little substance or meaning are published which offer very little in terms of value or engagement to the website visitors. This is a trap to steer well clear of – you may enjoy some traffic to these articles, but if you don’t offer anything of value then you will do more harm than good to your brand and the traffic becomes worthless.

Focus on adding valuable and informative content to your audience as opposed to just getting your word count up and your keywords in.

 Don’t just write content
Although much content that is published will be written text, your content marketing strategy should encompass a range of different types of content, as covered previously, where we discussed the different types of content marketing. 

Don’t give up
Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither will your content marketing strategy be. Good results from content marketing come from months and months of diligent work publishing regular content as search engines take time to index content and a blog looks like a far better resource if it has six months-worth of content than just a couple of articles. We know this as it was some time before our content marketing strategy started reaping the rewards, but we get huge value now in terms of website traffic and enquiries.

The point I’m trying to make is that if you’re excited about a content marketing strategy and haven’t got results three or four months in, then don’t give up as you’re likely on the cusp of breaking through and starting to see real results. And once you have a content marketing strategy working for you, website traffic and enquiries should keep growing and growing and growing.